Friday, July 30, 2010

The ARA has a new design for its web page. The redesign provides a more modern appearance and interactive framework. Kudos to ARA officers and web people for updating the site. Overall content has changed little, though you will find a link to this site on the links page!

July 28 screen capture for the home page of the ARA web site.

Adding Content to the Site: Links to articles and research are posted on their own page on the site. These links make me wonder why on the page for The American Revenuer there are no links to archives of old TAR issues or articles. This would be a great way to add content heft to the site. And as TAR is the property of the ARA, and the site is the ARA's, doesn't the ARA have the right to post these articles, especially if the site recognizes and makes clear the copyright status of the individual authors in each issue? I know there are lawyers in our group that could help clarify this issue, but I am certain that almost all contributors to TAR would be thrilled to have their work made more available, and that the ARA could readily protect itself with a simple disclaimer.

Thursday, July 29, 2010

Founded in New York as the Atlantic Insurance Company in 1838, the company would become a "mutual" insurance firm in 1842. By the 1850s the company was the largest marine and general insurance firm in North America.

The company was the only marine insurer in New York for generations, and consequently is associated with some very famous shipwrecks, including:

Titanic - Atlantic sold the policy for most of the ship's coverage.

Mary Celeste - this brigantine is famous for having been found adrift in the Atlantic with no crew and no explanation for her abandonment.

SS Central America - this sidewheeler was loaded with gold from California when it sank in a hurricane. The wreck was found in 1987 by the Columbus-American Discovery Group. Atlantic and a group of other insurance companies sued for claim to the wreck. Atlantic lost the case and Columbus-American was awarded 92% of the find.

Today the firm is located at 100 Wall Street and specializes in personal property/casualty insurance for wealthy individuals with high-value assets to protect.

Screen capture from current Atlantic Companies site that you can find here.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

No telling what sort of transaction this stamp was used for unless one can find a trail of documents from Robert Bines on which other battleship documentaries are found. Bines was a player in the high business community in Chicago. He was born in Bloomfleld, Ohio in 1842, arrived in Chicgo in 1866 and by 1869 was a member of the Chicago Board of Trade. By the time of this cancel he was a member of the Board of Directors.

The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald from January 21, 1902 reported the Mr. Bines had enough capital to speculate in Chicago area land claims:

Robert Bines, of Chicago, began, on the I7th inst., the " payment, at Dowagiac, Mich., of $34,000 to the Pottawatomie Indians [$ioo to each] for their title to lands along the lake front of Chicago." He evidently believes their claims to these lands to be sustained.

Bines was in the brick business too, as reported in the History of Chicago, Illinois by John Moses in 1895:

Among the leading establishments engaged in the manufacture at this time are the following: The Tiffany Pressed Brick Company is a corporation composed of the following directors : J. Van Inwagen, president ; J. Tiffany, vice-president ; N. K. Fairbank, Robert Bines, and J. B. Lyon. The capital of the concern is $200,000, and the value of the investment estimated at $300,000. It employs 75 hands, to whom are paid wages amounting to $4,500 per year. The value of the material used is $20,000, and of the output 100,000. The factory is at Momence, 111.

Monday, July 26, 2010

Today's featured document is contributed by Frank Sente. The document includes a seldom seen printed cancel by The Girard Trust Company, .

G.T. CO.

APRIL 1. 1902

This stamp comes from a share certificate for the Choctaw, Oklahoma, and Gulf Railroad Car Trust company. The full document scan is shown below.

I am seeking other values of the battleship series with a GT Co printed cancel. Has anybody seen these? This cancel was not documented by Richard Fullerton in his guide to documentary printed cancels from 1952.

Stephen Girard

1750 - 1831

The Girard Trust Company was started by and named for Stephen Girard.

The charter of Alexander Hamilton's First Bank of the United States expired in 1811. The bank was located in Philadelphia, the home of Stephen Girard, who was the richest man in the United States at the time. Girard bought up the stock and assets of the bank with the charter expiration and created his own bank, which eventually came to be known the Girard Trust Company. Girard's bank was the main source of financing for the US government for the War of 1812 - Girard personally underwrote 95% of the government's war loans. The Girard Trust Company merged with Mellon Bank in 1983.

My mother's family has roots in Girard, Richland Parish, Louisiana, near the town of Rayville. The family home in Girard was located on a piece of a Stephen Girard plantation, and the family still has some of the land from the plantation today. Girard never travelled to Louisiana but worked through a local agent, Judge Bry, to purchase land and establish his plantation.

inset from the full document of the stamp and signature

Share document for the Choctaw, Oklahoma and Gulf Railroad Cart Trust

From The New York Times, April 15, 1902:

CHOCTAW AND GULF SALE

Speyer & co. Deposit with Girard Trust Company Majority Stock,

PHILADELPHIA, April 14.--Over 155,000 shares of the stock of the Choctaw, Oklahoma and Gulf Railroad had been deposited with the Girard Trust Company in favor of the sale of the road to Speyer & Co. of New York up to the close of business today.

The total shares of the Choctaw issued amount to 296,000. This settles finally the question of ownership of the road, which goes to the New York banking house, and it is expected will be turned over to the Rock Island system.

The minority holders have until May 7 to accept the offer made, which is ofr the purchase of all common stock at $80 and preferred at $60.

Sunday, July 18, 2010

This post card documents seven coal deliveries to six locations via the Pennsylvania and Northwestern Railroad. The tax on coal deliveries was one cent per location, and the six cents worth of stamps paid for the deliveries to the six different locations listed on the card. There are many of these P&NRR postcards still around.

From Dorothy R. Adler, British Investment in American Railways 1834-1898 (Charlottesville, Va.: The University Press of Virginia, 1970), p. 144:

Barings was strictly an English firm until 1891 when a New York firm comprised of a family member was established (Baring, Magoun & Co.) by Alexander Baring, formerly of Kennedy, Tod & Co. (NY) and George Magoun, formerly of Kidder, Peabody & Co. The English firm dealt with Baring & Magoun in New York and Kidder, Peabody in Boston. The Baring family had migrated to Exeter, England from Bremen, Germany in 1717, and their descendants, Alexander and Henry Baring, married Americans. Barings had been one of the first English firms to handle American railroad bonds, and had a long-standing relationship with the B&O Railroad in Maryland.

Friday, July 16, 2010

Fenaline is a firm that seems to have disappeared to history. Online searches are extraordinarily productive with many companies from the 1898 era; The Fenaline Company draws not a single hit on Google. Joyce and Chappell had no information to even state city or state of origin, and we remain in the dark here at this blog. If you have any information on this company I would very much appreciate you help.

The J/C list is below. This is a short list, with only three collectable cancels posted. Below, however, are five scans from my collection of different collectable cancels, including a new type, which I have added to the new updated list/spreasheet for this firm.

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Another interesting contribution today from Frank Sente following the Missouri Pacific Railway (MOPAC) post from several days back. Below is a MOPAC bill of lading for "ordnance stores" weighing a total of 211 pounds that were shipped from the Springfield Armoury in Massachusetts to the Ordnance Office at Fort Crook in Nebraska. Unforunately, there are no details as to what types of ordnance. The shipment was for 211 pounds, which isn't all that much weight when bullets and shells and other type of ammunition are involved.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Two weeks after the war taxes came into effect, and stamp dealers were busy selling battleship revenue stamps. Note that a plate strip of 10 of the 4 cent proprietary was for sale for a $1.40 from Mr. Berlepsch.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

This is Mr. Benjamin Brandreth. He was born 1807 in England and died in 1880 in Ossining, New York. Mr. Brandreth was one of the first great proprietary medicine manufacturers in the United States, and pioneered mass marketing and advertising to generate sales for his "purgative' pills which were touted to purge the blood of toxins.

In 1849 a congressional committee reported that Brandreth was the largest proprietary advertiser in the United States, and that for 1862 and 1863 Brandreth's average gross income exceeded $600,000. Brandreth's pills were mentioned in Melville's Moby Dick.

Benjamin Brandreth's business was known as the Brandreth Pill Works when he first opened the business. He purchased Allcock's Porous Plaster from Thomas Allcock in 1848, and eventually renamed the firm to Allcock Manufacturing.

During the Civil War tax period, Brandreth had a private die stamp printed for Allcock Manufacturing:

The firm's proprietor, B. Brandreth, is listed on this stamp, as are the two key products of the company: Brandreth Pills and Allcock's Porous Plaster.

Private die stamps like the example above were powerful branding tools. In the years following the Civil War and after the proprietary tax was lifted, many companies that used private die stamps had labels printed similar to their original private die stamps to place on their product's packaging. Many proprietary pharmceuticals of the time were neither efficacious or safe, yet a US Government tax seal for many consumers implied the imprimateur of the government. So when the taxes were retired, many private die users replaced their tax stamps with labels that looked the same as the stamps.

Allcock Manufacturing used these labels after the Civil War tax period:

By the time of the 1898 war tax period, the labels were still on the Brandreth products, though new taxes and new stamps had to be applied to the pills and the plasters. The labels above were applied to their products along with 5/8c tax stamps. The top A. M. Co, example is for Allcock Manufacturing; the bottom P. P Co. example is for Porous Plaster Company. Examples of these labels with battleship stamps attached are not uncommon -- both Frank Sente and J.W. Palmer have sent scans from their collections.

The original Joyce/Chappell list for the Allcock or A. M. Co. cancels is very short, indicating only 5 collectable varieties. Three of the varieties listed are present due to printing issues associeted with planing or a shaving down of the 12-12-1900 canceling plates. The original J/C list lacks an explanation for what Joyce and Chappell note to be cancels with these "planed electros". I am not expert in printing techniques during the 1898 period, however, from the stamps I have and those noted in the J/C list, it is clear to me that several philatelically significant things were happening when Allcock Mfg decided to print new cancels for the year 1901:

The 12-12-1900 cancelling plates had their dates planed down to create new dates. The first 2 was planed off to yield a January or 1 months, and the final zero in the year was planed off to yield a slightly curved 1, so that the cancel would appear as a 1 -12-1901.

Inconsistency in the planing process would yield different widths of the remaining piece of the zero, so that each cancel might appear slightly different, so that there may be many varieties of this cancel, though J/C only list the major variety of a zero having been left unplaned on the 5/8c stamp. There is an example below of a cancel with nearly all the zero gone, with only a small fragment of the original numeral left.

Planed electro example - following the first 1 was a 2 on the orignal canceling plate. It is gone in this example, as is 2/3s of the final zero.

Planed ectro example as in the second stamp above.

Example of a dramatic printing variety of the planed electro in the year date. The final zero is, to use the words of Henry Tolman "all but obliterated".

I would be very interested in examining a large group of these Allcock cancels to gauge the varieties of planed zeroes.

ex-Tolman, now Langlois Porous Plaster cancels. Two handstamp examples at bottom and a third at left with label attached.

Frank Sente's Porous Plaster cancels with J/C unlisted variety at the top left.

Monday, July 12, 2010

In the J/C list, Hobron is something of a mystery. The city is reported as unknown, and nothing more is offered about the company except for the name in the cancel: "Hobron". Google solved this mystery with a single search.

Hobron Drug Company was based in Honolulu, and was owned by T.W. Hobron, the son of a famous retired sea captain, Thomas H. Hobron. T.H. Hobron made himself a wealthy Hawaiin businessman through a sugar plantation and a railroad and port used to haul and load the sugar for export.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

The Newark, New Jersey-based Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company was founded in 1845 and dissolved as a firm in 2001. The company was known as the "Tiffany" of insurance companies because of its high percentage of upper class clientele. The company was taken over by the State of New Jersey in 1991 after real estate losses prompted a run by policy holders. The collapse of the firm was the largest ever by an American insurer at that time.

The original MBLI headquarters at 300 Broadway in Newark is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. It is currently a nursing home and is owned by the Archdiocese of Newark.

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Cancel by the Chicago Coliseum Company during the first year of the Coliseum's operation

Postcard of the Chicago Coliseum

Located at 1513 South Wabash in Chicago, the Coliseum operated from 1899 to 1982, and until the Chicago Stadium was opened in the late 1920s, the Coliseum was Chicago's most important large convention hall.

The building hosted every Republican National Committee convention from 1904 to 1920, and Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party convention in 1912. The building was for a brief period the home of the Chicago Blackhawks. The promoter Leo Seltzer invented roller derby to help fill seats in the Coliseum. And it was the home to an NBA franchise known as the Chicago Zephyrs, which moved after its first year in 1962 to Baltimore to become the Bullets. The franchise is now known as the Washington Wizards.

The Coliseum was demolished in 1983 when I was a sophomore at Northwestern University.

Photo of the interior of the Coliseum during preparations for the 1912 Republican National Convention held June 18-22.

Search 1898 Revenues -- or Inquire at 1898revenues@gmail.com

The Cotton Trade in late 19th Century America

Click on Edgar Degas' painting "Cotton Exchange" to explore posts on this site from firms in the cotton trade during the 1898 tax period.

Stock Brokers at 1898 Revenues

Explore 1898 to 1902 stock broker cancels by clicking on the brokers above.

Strong Cobb & Company or Snyder, Chaffee & Company?

How did an internet auction and an observant collector in 2011 correct a mistake made by leading collectors like Clarence Chappell and Morton Dean Joyce going back 70+ years? Read Frank Sente's philatelic detective story by clicking on the stamp.

Publishing 1898 Revenues

John Langlois is the publisher of this site. He began seriously collecting 1898s in 1999, soon after his return from Liberia. Now a resident of Kenya, John publishes 1898 Revenues as a way to keep up with his collection and communicate with other collectors. Additional content contributors to this site include: Dave Thompson, Bob Hohertz, Frank Sente, Malcolm A. Goldstein, Bob Patetta, Tim Kohler, Ron Lesher, Bart Rosenberg, Len McMaster, Hermann Ivester, Richard Friedberg, J. W. Palmer, Michael Mahler, Rick Lokos, and Sean Roberts. These collectors have sent in scans and sometimes explanatory information regarding their stamps or documents for posting on this site. Dave Thompson is a prodigous supplier of material and ideas, while Malcolm, Bob H. and Frank S. have contributed posts to this site. We welcome other contributors! Write to us at 1898revenues@gmail.com.

Note on the title painting

Above is a low res image of Mort Kunstler's painting The Rough Riders. The painting depicts the 1st Volunteer US Cavalry led by Teddy Roosevelt charging Kettle Hill near Santiago, Cuba during the Spanish American War. See more of Kunstler's work at http://www.mortkunstler.com/. Image copyright Mort Kunstler.

1898 Revenues Wanted

Values for Series of 1898 Revenue Stamps - The "Battleship Revenues"

Most 1898 "Battleship" stamps, whether of the documentary or the proprietary series, are fairly common and cheap stamps, despite having been issued and used more than 100 years ago. If you have one of the more common values of this series, your stamp or stamps are likely worth less than a dollar in used condition, regardless of perforation or other distinguishing characteristics.

Whether you look at online catalogs for these stamps, such as Eric Jackson's website, or you refer to a standard reference for values of these stamps like the Scott US Specialized Stamp Catalog, you will find only a few stamps of this series to be worth more than a few dollars when in used condition.

These are only example values and ranges of values for some of the more common stamps you might find in old documents or in a relative's collection, and they are only meant to be a guide. However, there are some stamps of this series that are a bit more scarce than others and consequently command higher values. In particular:

In all cases, any of these stamps found on old documents or on old products, especially the proprietary stamps, are worth far more when still on the original item or document of use. Don't remove them from the document or old box or bottle unless you are certain you know what you are doing!

Bob Hohertz on 1898 Stamped Paper

Frank Sente's American Philatelist 1898 Revenues Cover Story

In the 1950s, Morton Dean Joyce updated a list of printed cancels on the battleship proprietaries compiled by Clarence Chappell. Joyce's is a very long list consisting of more than one hundred companies and thousands of cancel dates. In the years since Joyce completed his list, many new cancel dates have been demonstrated to exist, and an update of the 1950s list is needed.

This site is attempting that update. Using the Joyce/Chappell lists and the former collection of Henry Tolman (ARA #25) as a base, a gradual effort will be made to post updated lists to the best of my knowledge, making a call for those that can contribute new dates and new images of those cancels.

Following in this column are quick links to excel files of these lists by company. Also are links to the posts that I have made on this blog regarding these companies and their cancels.

Feature: G. H. Mumm Printed Cancels

FEATURE: CHATTANOOGA MEDICINE COMPANY PRINTED CANCELS

Criteria for Cancels Included in these Updated Lists

The updated lists on this site will not include handstamped cancels. Printed and typed cancels will be included. This differs from the Chappell and Joyce criteria for inclusion.

Joyce used criteria for including cancels in his lists based on Chappell's original criteria. From the introduction of Chappell's original list: "Only the printed and typed cancels will be given consideration in this list. The only exception being those firms who also had private die stamps in this period. The handstamps of these few companies are of general interest and I feel they should be included." I don't think the "general interest" consideration is a strong enough reason to complicate an already complicated set of lists. The handstamps listed by Chappell and Joyce are not printed by definition, they are likely not exhaustive, and by virtue of being handstamps are prone to innumerable types and subtypes. I reason that if a new list is of printed cancels, we should keep it that way, and let others that have have done more work on the subject of proprietary handstamps handle those cancels.

Thus, if you are interested in the handstamp cancels of any of the firms in the updated printed cancel lists, please refer to the excellent work of Robert Mustacich and his Battleship Desk Reference at http://www.battleship-revenues.com/.

The practice of eliminating handstamp cancels from the updated lists will have implications for the revision of cancel types from the Joyce lists. For example, the first few Antikamnia cancel types according to both Joyce and Chappell are handcancels. These cancels will no longer be included as cancel types.

The goal will be to minimize confusion for those who come to collect these cancels and make sense out of them.

1898's Personal Kenya Blog

Photos from Kenya - Click on the Hyrax!

Join the American Revenue Association

Click on the seal to go to the ARA site where you can find an application